Guitar groups are on the way out,” declared British music executive Dick Rowe of Decca soon after new year’s day of 1962. His off-the-cuff comment was apparently directed at the legendary Brian Epstein, the manager of the Beatles, though the man himself denied having said it.
Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison and Pete Best drove for hours to reach London to audition for Decca Records. Finally, they had a 15-song demo tape, and all but three of them were covers. It turned out to be underwhelming for Decca. Instead, the music label signed on Brian Poole and the Tremeloes.
You read that right… Pete Best, not Ringo Starr. Starr would not replace Best until August 1962. Nonetheless, the Decca incident proved to be a costly mistake as the group signed with Parlophone Records, the jewel in the crown for EMI, and they went on to become the greatest band of all time.
The Beatles perform in a Liverpool club prior to signing their first recording contract in 1962. Left to right: George Harrison, John Lennon, Paul McCartney and original drummer Pete Best. Picture: Getty Images
Whatever happened to the audition tape? In 2012, a safety master tape of the audition was sold at an auction to a collector for over $56,000 at the time but it contained only 10 songs.
The story gets interesting. Recently, Rob Frith, owner of Vancouver’s Neptoon Records, decided to play an old tape lying around the store. It was labelled ‘Beatles 60s Demos’. Such tapes often turn out to be bootlegs. Soon after listening to the tape, he discovered that it was a rare copy of an early audition tape by the Beatles.
He took to social media: “I picked up this tape years ago that said ‘Beatles Demos’ on it. I just figured it was a tape off a bootleg record. After hearing it last night for the first time, it sounds like a master tape. The quality is unreal. How is this even possible to have, what sounds like a Beatles 15 song Decca tapes master?”
The real thing
Frith, 69, cannot recall how the tape made its way to his store, which is a repository for tens of thousands of vinyl records. The Beatles demo tape was lying inside a cardboard box until he asked his disc jockey friend Larry Hennessey to load it onto his vintage tape player on March 11. Suddenly, a 21-year-old John Lennon blared out the Motown hit Money (That’s What I Want). To listen to the tape, Hennessey used a Studer A810, a vintage tape player made in Switzerland.
All 15 songs from the Decca audition are there and the recording is clear enough to feel the presence of the Beatles in the room.
Between each song, there is a buffer of white leader tape. It is used when tapes are spliced to create space between songs. A bootlegger wouldn’t go through all the trouble. Further, the tape is free of noise distortions. Then came the magic moment: There are six different edits of the song September in the Rain. This was the real thing.
Decca Records producer and A&R man Dick Rowe. Behind him is a display of Decca albums by Lulu, The Bachelors and others. Picture: Getty Images
Are the Beatles any good on this demo? Of course, they are. Perhaps not at their finest, but definitely very good.
Many years ago, Paul McCartney was asked if the “Decca stuff” sounds good. “You can’t claim that it sounds good, cos technology’s better, we can make better records now. But that early stuff is interesting. It’s like seeing some artist’s early sketches. It may not be as good as his later work, but you see the germs of it all.”
“Listening to the tapes I can understand why we failed the Decca audition,” he said in the Anthology book. “We weren’t that good; though there were some quite interesting and original things.”
Did Decca make a mistake?
After a clip of the tape was put on social media, Frith came upon a person named Jack Herschorn, former owner of Mushroom Records in Vancouver. He originally brought the tape to Vancouver.
During a trip to London in the ’70s, Herschorn was given the tape by a producer and he was advised to sell copies of it in North America. Herschorn refused.
“I took it back and I thought about it quite a bit… I didn’t want to put it out because I felt — I didn’t think it was a totally moral thing to do…. These guys, they’re famous and they deserve to have the right royalties on it… it deserves to come out properly,” Herschorn, who now lives in Mexico, told CBC.
Frith told The New York Times that he would consider giving the tape to McCartney and was also thinking about holding a listening event for charity. Otherwise, he said, he planned to keep the tape.
Decca can’t be blamed for overlooking the Beatles. Publishers have turned down a book about a boy wizard by a hopeful young writer called Joanne Rowling. William Orton, the president of the Western Union, in 1876 did not pay $100,000 for Alexander Graham Bell’s patent for the telephone, declaring the apparatus was almost a toy. Dick Rowe at least redeemed himself by signing the Rolling Stones.
Rowe of Decca had his reasons for choosing another group. George Martin, the Fab Four’s producer at Parlophone, told British author Mark Lewisohn that, on the basis of those demos, he would have turned them down, too.
Also, Rowe was probably not present at the audition. He told his junior colleague Mike Smith to choose between the Beatles and the other group, Brian Poole and the Tremeloes.
March 1964: Brian Poole (centre) and his group the Tremeloes on the set of pop programme Ready Steady Go. Decca Records chose them over the Beatles
Epstein made his claim about Rowe in his autobiography A Cellarful of Noise but the Decca man refused it until the day he died in 1986. “I told Mike he’d have to decide between them. It was up to him — The Beatles or Brian Poole and the Tremeoloes. He said: ‘They’re both good, but one’s a local group, the other comes from Liverpool.’ We decided it was better to take the local group. We could work with them more easily and stay closer in touch as they came from Dagenham,” Rowe said.
Whatever the truth, one can’t deny the encouragement the group received from George Martin, a man who was willing to let the group record their own material and explore new directions.
Steve Bradley, a Beatles historian, wrote in 2021: “Had they been signed by Decca they’d have an unsympathetic producer and recorded unsuitable material possibly at the expense of their own compositions. Recording their first album with Martin a year later they had a better drummer, more studio experience, another year of songwriting and gigging, and more Hamburg trips completed – they were a different band. When rejected by Decca they felt it was the worst thing to happen, but history shows it was one of their biggest lucky breaks.”